Our Solar System's Planets: Mercury

mercury it is of course the solar system's closest planet to the Sun stick with me on this video and you will learn everything you need to know about mercury everything I'll show you today will be actual picture or video images of mercury we'll be talking about the orbit and rotation of mercury its physical characteristics its surface conditions and the magnetic field and magnetosphere of the planet now when you think about the physical characteristics of mercury I'm sure you imagine it being the closest planet to the Sun and it's giant rock just floating in space you will be too far wrong with that but it is much more interesting than what you may first think for example what I like at mercury I do think of our Moon the mercury actually is visually more appealing than our moon look at it in its true color the first thing that I notice is that it actually does have a color it's not just different shades of grey and what else well did you know for example the mercury consists of approximately 70% metallic and 30% silicon materials because of this Mercury's density is the second highest in the solar system at five point four to seven grams per centimeter cube only slightly less than the planet with the greatest density that of Earth five point five one five grams per centimeter cubed if mercury happen to be the same size as Earth that would mean it would have pretty much the same gravitational pole as its surface but being the size as it is in surface gravity is only three point seven meters per second squared if you would compare it to earth it would look something like this this means the surface gravity of mercury is only slightly less than what it is on Mars and considering Mars is a much bigger planet that just says something about the density of make before we leave the subject of mercury in size I want to show you one last comparison that of Ganymede and Titan against mercury now Ganymede is the solar system's biggest moon and also the biggest moon of Jupiter while Titan is Saturn's biggest mirrors the second biggest moon in the solar system these two giant moons of bigger than mercury as you can see here but their masses are less if you look closely at Mercury's surface you'll see its appearance is similar to that of the moon it shows extensive Mar like Plains and heavy cratering indicating that it has been geologically inactive for billions of years but it obviously was geologically active at one point because one of the distinctive features of Mercury's surface with the presence of many narrow ridges extended up to several hundred kilometers in length it's believed that these were formed as Mercury's core and mantle cooled and contracted over time when the crust had already solidified and one distinctive thing you'll notice about mercury is this huge crater on its surface color is Basin with a diameter of 1,550 kilometers the impact the created calories basin was so powerful it caused lava eruptions and left a concentric ring of a two kilometers tall surrounding the impact crater at the antipode of the calories basin is a large region of unusual hilly terrain known as the weird terrain if you would compare it to the rest of mercury you would see I will have this name so what's it like on the surface of mercury well to start with the surface temperature is hugely different all over it can range from minus 173 degrees centigrade to over 400 degrees centigrade never rises above minus 93 degrees of the pole because there's no atmosphere retaining the heat and so there's quite a big difference between the equator and the poles but it's also due to its orbit and rotation which we'll get back to later the subsolar point reaches about 400 degrees while on the dark side of the planet the temperatures average minus 163 degrees because mercury is too small and hot with gravity to retain any significant atmosphere over long periods of time it's not able to retain any of the heat it gets from being so close to the Sun which is why the dark side of the planet is so much colder than the side facing the Sun mercury though does have an exosphere which is like a very very thin atmosphere like volume surrounding the planet when molecules are gravitationally bound to that planet but the density is so low that it can't behave as a gas because these molecules don't collide with each other in this picture you can see proof of the exosphere when solar winds hit the planet they rip off certain atoms out of the exosphere and what's left is this trail of atoms going into space we call this the planets tail and every time it has this to a certain extent this does have an exosphere but it's 600 kilometers above the surface it's really the point where space and the atmosphere meet now in the case of mercury this exosphere is not at all stable atoms are continuously lost and replenished from a variety of sources very recently NASA has been able to confirm that craters at the North Pole contain water ice mercury also has something which Mars lacks an actual magnetosphere or a magnetic field all around the planet now it is only about 1.1 percent as strong as it hurts but it's still strong enough to deflect a lot of the solar wind around the planet and now finally we're going to get to one of the things which I find the most interesting about mercury its orbit and it's rotation mercury has the most eccentric orbits of all the planets with assistance from the Sun ranging from 46 million kilometers to 70 million kilometers now this is something a bit hard to imagine mercury takes about 88 Earth days to complete an orbit around the Sun it also has a 3-2 spin orbit resonance of the planets rotation around its axis this means it spins three times around its axis for every two times that it orbits around the Sun so although it takes about 59 Earth days for mercury to rotate on its axis but with this 3:2 orbital resonance actually standing on Mercury it would appear that one day from sunrise to sunrise is to your Kurian years standing on Mercury that would look something like this you see the Sun Rise quite fast and then as it approaches midday it slows down and even starts going backwards before continuing on again to sunset as you can see that took a whole year which means a night time on Mercury also takes you the Sun starts going backwards in the sky because approximately four Earth days before brilliant the speed in which mercury rotates around its orbit equals the speeding which is rotating so that the sun's of higher motion stays stationary Pat Parelli in itself makers orbital speed exceeds its rotational speed so to a person actually standing on Mercury the Sun appears to move backwards four days after per iliyan the sun's normal motion resumes you can see this even clearer from a top-down perspective of mercury on one of its poles twice a day the Sun seems to pause and then continue on again something else to note about Mercury's orbit is its inclined by seven degrees to the plane of Earth's orbit as a result of this we can only see mercury in front of the Sun when it's directly between us on earth and the Sun itself and because its orbit is inclined by seven degrees this only happens about once every 7 years finally about the rotation of mercury is axial tilt is almost zero with the best measured value as low as more point not to 7 degrees this is even smaller than that of Jupiter which has been measured at 3.1 degrees and finally do you want to see earth from Mercury well here we are just a couple of pixels across this picture was taken from the messenger probe a couple of years ago and every single one of us was in this picture well thank you so much for watching this video I hope you learned something today about mercury and that it seems more interesting to you now than when you started this video I'm really grateful as well for everyone who watched the Mars video on my channel which seems to have really taken off and for the positive feedback I've got from it if you do want to learn more about our solar system I do plan to do a video on every single one of our planets and more would you like to join me on this journey then subscribe like and share and I'll see you in the next video

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Keywords: Mercury (Planet), mercury, Solar System Documentary, Solar System (Star System), solar system planets, solar system videos, mercury planet, planet mercury documentary, Planet (Celestial Object Category), Astronomy (Field Of Study), astrum, astrumspace, MESSENGER (Space Mission), nasa, NASA (Spacecraft Manufacturer), our solar system's planets, caloris basin

Id: m3ZUhpisWeQ

Length: 8min 30sec (510 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 08 2014